Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry (11 page)

The sheer volume
of
film production and the history of cinema in India, especially its contemporaneity with the West, is represented in state publications as a sign of the nation-state’s modernity. On July 7, 1896, a representative of the Lumière Brothers, traveling from Paris en route to Australia, screened the first motion pictures in India, in Bombay’s Watsons Hotel—six months after its originary screening in Paris on December 28, 1895. This history became a cause for celebration, evident by the state’s investment at both the central and regional levels in commemorating the centenary of cinema, in 1995 and 1996. The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (MIB) created a National Committee for the Celebration of the Cinema Centenary, which organized a series of countrywide commemorations. Though the first screening of motion pictures in India did not take place until July 1896, the commemorations were kicked off with the 26th International Film Festival of India (IFFI), held in Bombay in January 1995.

The concern with temporality, or what Abraham terms “postcolonial
time
” (1998), is apparent in the reasons offered for initiating the celebrations even before the actual anniversary of the first film screenings in India (or in Paris for that matter). At the inauguration ceremony for the IFFI, in Bombay on January 10, 1995, the union minister for information and broadcasting, K. P. Singh Deo, remarked, “It is fitting that the first international film festival in this centenary year of world cinema is being held in India, the most prolific film producer in the world, and in Bombay, the birthplace and capital of Indian cinema” (“International film festival opened” 1995). The English-language booklet, “A Hundred Years of Cinema in India: A Conspectus,” produced by the MIB’s publications division, raises the issue of the discrepancy between the arrival of motion pictures in India and celebrations having begun in 1995. It also points out that the first short film made by an Indian was not until 1899, and thus “One may therefore wonder that our country should legitimately be observing the cinema centenary between 1996 and 1999” (Rangoonwalla 1995a: 1). The booklet resolves this issue by explaining, “Yet, our keeping pace with the rest of the world, which is celebrating the centenary of cinema in 1995, has been justified by a pioneering experiment in 1894–95 to make the image move. This was
Shambarik Karolika
(Magic Lantern) a show by Mahadeo Patwardhan and his two sons, where three slide projectors throwing double colour plates created an illusion of movement.
Since it also told a story with the external aids of narration and music, this could be taken as India’s first exploration of the moving image” (Rangoonwalla 1995a: 1). The Hindi version of this booklet produced a few months later, in July 1995, asserts more definitively India’s right to celebrate the centenary of cinema in 1995: “We regard the birth of cinema in India to be the invention of the Magic Lantern, by Mahadeo Patwardhan and his two sons in 1894–95, and from this perspective, we are also celebrating the centenary of cinema with the rest of the world in 1995” (Rangoonwalla 1995b: 2).

In contrast to Chattopadhyay’s statements about cinema as an alien cultural form, these booklets, produced by the MIB fifteen years later, provide indigenous antecedents and firmly locate cinema as a part of Indian aesthetic and performative traditions. All of the debates about the foreignness of the medium, which were articulated as late as 1980 in the
Working Group Report
, have been effectively displaced by descriptions of the cultural rootedness of early cinema in India. The Hindi booklet declares that “in the silent era, films were made on all topics related to Indian traditions and sensibilities” (Rangoonwalla 1995b: 9). Cinema is linked to indigenous cultural traditions through content from the early filming of theatrical performances and via stories from Hindu epics serving as the inspiration for the first features.

In addition to proclaiming the cultural authenticity of cinema and India’s coeval participation in the global technological order, the centenary commemorations initiated in 1995 also laid claim to the site of the first Lumière screenings in Paris as part of a common heritage. During the IFFI, the National Film Development Corporation (NFDC) commissioned an art director from the Hindi film industry to recreate the original venue of the Lumière Brothers’ first screenings at the Nehru Centre.
²⁶
“Thanks to NFDC and the genius of art director Nitin Desai, cinegoers can now walk down the historical Paris boulevard where cinema was born,” stated a newspaper article about the recreation of the site of the original Lumière Brothers’ screening. The article described how Nitin Desai, a noted art director of the Bombay film industry, spent close to a million rupees and took six weeks to transform the portico of the Nehru Centre into a replica of Paris’s Rue Scribe, the street on which the Grand Café—the site of the original screening of the Lumière Brothers’ cinematographe—was located. The nineteenth-century Parisian ambiance was heightened with shop fronts, and both a horse carriage and a vintage car were parked on the “street,” while during the inaugural ceremony NFDC employees sported bicornes (the two-cornered hat worn by Napoleon) and bore
posters titled “Cinematographe Lumière.” The exhibition space was converted into the Grand Café, decorated with a wooden model of the cinematographe and a plaster of Paris statue of Auguste Lumière. During the inaugural function, which was attended by the French ambassador and some members of the Hindi film industry, the ten early Lumière shorts were screened in what one newspaper report described as a “dutiful repetition of the past” (“NFDC’s tribute to first film venue” 1995).

The commemoration of the past was not solely a European one; as a tribute to a century of Indian cinema the NFDC also organized a temporary film museum, with items from landmark Hindi films, and produced a stage show, “Cinema Cinema 100,” in collaboration with the Hindi film industry. The stage show, which was televised live nationally on
Doordarshan
, the state broadcaster, was a combination of speeches, tributes, song and dance performances, and edited sequences of the landmarks of Indian cinema, organized chronologically into four main eras.

During my fieldwork I was able to attend the final commemorative event, which was the Indian Cinema Centenary Celebration, organized by the
National Film Archives
in conjunction with the Department of Cultural Affairs of the Government of Maharashtra, on July 7, 1996. The event was a combination of public and semi-public rituals inscribing the history of cinema in India onto the urban landscape of Bombay.
²⁷
The key attraction was a procession of members of the Hindi and Marathi film industries to the site of the Watsons Hotel, where the Chief Minister of Maharashtra unveiled a plaque affixed to the building proclaiming its historical importance.
²⁸
The plaque simply stated, “Lumière Brothers’ ‘Cinematographe’ was first screened here on 7th July, 1896, at the erstwhile Watsons Hotel, thus sowing the seed of one of the most popular of the art forms of this century, cinema in India.”

After the parade and unveiling of the plaque, the proceedings shifted to the nearby Y. B. Chavan auditorium for the final ceremonies of the day, which involved inaugurations of the weeklong film festival and an exhibition of photographs documenting the 100 years of Indian cinema. Sixteen people—a combination of government officials and film personalities— sat on stage against a graphic of a motion picture camera and the words, “100 Years of Indian Cinema,” emblazoned in Marathi on a backdrop of marigolds.
²⁹

Various government officials made short speeches about the historic importance of the occasion and on the significance of cinema in India. The minister for cultural affairs, Pramod Navalkar, declared that “this is an industry where there are no divisions based on caste, language, religion,
or region.” The director of the National Film Archives, Suresh Chhabria, asserted, “It is really the public of India that has taken cinema to their hearts and minds. Nowhere in the world has a public taken to cinema as much as has the public of India. It is really them we have to thank.” Once the speeches were done, the same Lumière films that were screened a hundred years before—
Arrival of a Train
,
Workers Leaving a Factory
,
By the
Seaside
, and
Baby’s Dinner
—were screened in the auditorium. After the screenings, most people trooped upstairs to the exhibition of film stills, posters, and photographs organized by the National Film Archives to represent a visual history of the hundred years of Indian cinema.

What was striking about these rituals
of
commemoration was the extent of the state’s involvement. While the state had been involved in the regulation, documentation, disciplining, and discussion of filmmaking since colonial times, its role in commemoration and celebration—other than the annual ritual of national awards, begun in 1954—had been minimal. Various filmmaking organizations, such as the Film Federation of India and the Indian Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, held events and produced publications—in 1956 and 1981, respectively— commemorating the twenty-fifth and fiftieth anniversaries of Indian sound films.
³⁰
These earlier commemorations were initiated and organized by filmmakers, with bureaucrats and government officials providing felicitations and commentary, while the centenary celebrations were initiated and organized by state institutions, with filmmakers playing a small role.

Whereas the earlier state-generated discourse was filled with prescriptive statements directed at the Bombay film industry to create “socially relevant” films to “uplift” the masses, statements from the various events and texts associated with the centennial commemorations were light on criticism of popular cinema. Instead, they detailed the prolific nature of film production in India, emphasizing India’s lead over the rest of the world, reiterated that the history of cinema in India was as old as the history of the medium itself, and asserted the popularity of domestic films within India. The centenary commemorations demonstrated the transformed symbolic significance accorded to the institution of cinema by the state, at both the national and regional levels, by the mid-1990s.

I attribute the growth of this symbolic significance to the changes in the media landscape engendered by the processes of economic liberalization. After the advent of
satellite television
in 1992, dubbed by the press and some commentators as an “invasion,” the mass media became the locus of public debates, controversies, and anxiety around questions
of Indian nationhood, cultural sovereignty, authenticity, tradition, and identity.
³¹
During this period, the state’s policy rhetoric regarding media was focused more on safeguarding national sovereignty and “Indian values” than “uplifting the masses” (Mankekar 1999). In addition to satellite television, the other noticeable feature of the transformed media landscape was the increased presence of Hollywood films, both in their original English and dubbed versions. With the appearance of American content on television and in theaters, Hindi films took on the value of cultural authenticity and Indian-ness vis-à-vis Hollywood films. It was not simply in their identity as indigenously produced films, however, but also in their very objectified and elaborated representations of Indianness, discussed in the next chapter, that films from the mid-1990s operated as signs of the nation.

The Central government’s announcement giving industry status to filmmaking actually took place at a conference in Bombay, titled “National Conference on Challenges Before
Indian Cinema
,” organized by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce (FICCI) and the Film Federation of India (FFI), which are both private trade and industry organizations.
³²
The conference was held at the plush five-star hotel Leela Kempinski and attended by representatives of the two organizations, as well as state officials and members of the Hindi film industry.
³³
The proceedings were structured in such a manner that filmmakers presented papers in sessions chaired by government ministers—from the Information and Broadcasting Ministry, the Department of Education, the Department of Revenue, and the Reserve Bank of India—who then provided the concluding remarks for each session.

The dominant tone of the presentations was of crisis and appeal: that filmmaking in India was undergoing a series of crises due to mounting costs, exorbitant taxation, rampant piracy, and a lack of regularized finance; an appeal was made to the Central government to take the lead in ameliorating these conditions. Nearly every presentation discussed how the state had been negligent toward cinema for decades, so that any achievement on the part of filmmakers thus far had been entirely on their own.
³⁴
Amit Khanna, a longstanding member of the Bombay industry who has occupied a myriad of roles from writer to producer, asserted in his presentation that “successive governments have done precious little for this business, and if the Industry has survived for so many decades it is not with the Government’s help, but in spite [of] it” (Khanna 1998: 6).
³⁵

Veteran producer/director J. Om Prakash, in his presentation
about
the necessity for institutional finance, listed nine achievements on the part of filmmakers and then pointed to the potential of Indian films in the global market, akin to the Indian information technology industry. “Imagine if the industry could reach such great heights without the support of the Government [or] institutional finance, then imagine what the industry could achieve for the nation? If proper incentives and infrastructure facilities are provided, the country can compete with Hollywood initially in a small way, but later on, once the industry gains momentum, then the country can give competition to Hollywood. See the growth of [the] high-tech computer software industry. Who would have thought that India would compete with developed nations in such sophisticated area?. . . We can produce world class international films and compete with 20th Century Fox” (Prakash 1998: 15). Prakash’s statements contain the allochronism and telos intrinsic to development discourse (Gupta 1998) regarding the unexpected global success of the Indian software industry as well as the desire to overcome the constraints of postcolonial
time
(Abraham 1998) in terms of the film industry. A key difference in his remarks from those presented in previous sections, however, is their external address. Rather than helping to transform Indian society, film becomes a means to compete in the global economic order, thereby accruing prestige unto the nation on the world stage.